


(it's a nice day for a) white wedding

by heart_nouveau



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Character Study, Gen, House Tyrell, POV Margaery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-18 02:30:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heart_nouveau/pseuds/heart_nouveau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s always known she wouldn’t be long for Highgarden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(it's a nice day for a) white wedding

 

 

This isn’t exactly the life she’d expected to be leading.

When they first tell her, all the Tyrells gathered in council in the large west solar, she is surprised. The rest of her family looks expectant, solemn, contemplative—yet from the glowing look on her father’s ruddy-cheeked face, you’d think it was all his idea.

The thing is, it _wasn’t_ her father’s idea. The most surprising thing was that it was Loras who had asked her first.

She thinks for a minute that she’s misheard her brother when he tells her, pulling her into the garden labyrinth for a private conference of two. He’s hasty and excited, like when he’s preparing for the joust and his blood is up. 

True, they’ve always grown as close as two intertwined vines, but she’d never imagined that one day _this_ would be something Loras would ask of her.

“And you’ll be all right with me fucking your lover?” she says, a bit incredulous. Something pinches in her brother’s face; he winces, and her heart sinks in her chest. Of course Loras didn’t think this through to its logical conclusion. She can tell that he has only dreamed up to the part with Renly glowing on the throne, Loras at his side, Margaery loving and loved and included, but only vaguely.

The idea is not entirely surprising, though, for she knows Loras started whispering in Lord Renly’s ear long before things had any real chance of coming to fruition. Now Renly’s prospects are looking that much rosier than before, and Margaery’s involvement must seem like the only logical option: it’s neat and fits well, which is exactly the way the Tyrells like to do it. Even Loras, steeped as he has been in the sultry intrigues of the southern courts since he was a little boy, can see that. So he has taken his chance, and asked her.

But judging by the look on his face she can see that as usual, Loras has not thought things through. There is never much room for personal comfort in these games they play, these tight elaborate maneuvers; indeed, smiling graciously and accepting one’s compromised losses is one of the things every young Tyrell must learn. Margaery has long understood how to balance her decisions and accept the costs in a way that ensures at least some fraction of her famous smile is always genuine. This is how things are for them, and she does not intend unhappiness to be part of her natural lot in life if she has the power to make it otherwise.

But then her brother Loras has always been quicker on his feet than with forethought, and it’s simply too late by the time he realizes the extent of what he’s suggested.

  

  

 

It doesn’t even make sense to her, at first. Lord Renly isn’t first in line to the throne, nor is he second, or even third. Joffrey, Tommen, Stannis—there are other Baratheon heirs, and they come first. She’s used to looking at situations and seeing where she can fit in, masking her entrance with stunning smiles and disarmingly sweet compliance. But this, when they ask her, feels at first as though they’re asking her to break down a stone wall with nothing but her hands.

“They could take my head for that,” she says crisply now to her family. “They could take my head for that, if we lose.”

She sees her father’s bright excitement flicker, his expression working in stark relief to the impassive look her mother wears beside him. Her mother moves in subtle, roundabout ways to circumvent Mace Tyrell’s thoughtless bravado, but she saves her opinions for behind the scenes, after the fact. This is how Alerie preserves her considerable power—for if she disapproves of some scheme of her husband’s, that idea will never see light of day. But speaking against her husband in public has never been her mother’s way, and Margaery knows she must look elsewhere now if she wants someone to speak up on her behalf.

She looks at the rest of them, seated before her in an unconscious family tableau. Her brother Garlan is looking obediently to their father, arms folded over his broad chest (for all his good looks, in disposition he seems almost exactly like their biddable father made young). Willas, always so thoughtful, frowns as he looks at Margaery, tapping his cane gently against his leg; he too must be trying to find the logic in this situation, with its rather glaring chink in the armor. But Loras’s excitement is undimmed, shining in his face like a light. He is the only other person standing, a golden figure written in restless movements as he waits for her response.

Then she sees her grandmother Olenna sit up in her chair with a sharp shrewd gleam in her eye, wearing the look that means she knows something she’s just biding her time to reveal. “We won’t let that happen,” her grandmother says to her, simply.

And since the strongest constant in Margaery’s life is her sleek, healthy confidence in this old woman—for it was her grandmother alone who had taught her the rules of the game, the lines of the playing field, and also how to recognize the rare moments when it’s safe to ignore all those caveats—her rising doubts are dashed.

So she says yes.

 

 

 

And that is how she ended up here, presiding next to her pretender king over what is likely to be the prettiest war camp Westeros has ever seen. She loves him for Loras’ sake, and she loves him because he is gentle and good. But she can never really look at him, because _he_ never looks at her full in the eyes, as if the façade of what they are doing is too much to maintain at close quarters. He kisses her hand like a perfect gentleman in front of his court in a way that his lips never touch her when they are alone.

She doesn’t mind being his queen, though. She can tell immediately why Loras fell in love with him. Renly is charming, gracious, and blessed with the effortless ability to solve disputes with no more than a wave of his hand and a few well-chosen words. If by some miracle they do succeed, he will make a wonderful king.

But Loras has grown sullen, pale, and flustered. He is unhappy having to share Renly, and Margaery has to bite back her temper sometimes when she is around him. _This was supposedly all your idea_ , she wants to remind him pointedly, although she knows this is untrue. (Really the seeds of Loras’s idea were planted by her grandmother’s well-placed whispers some time ago, when Loras had first started making eyes at the King’s handsome younger brother.) Loras’s mood is only worsened by the fact that he now has to share his Renly with not only his sister, but an entire adoring court, too. Renly can make people love him with nothing more than a smile, and Margaery sometimes reflects that at the end of it all, that probably is what she and her husband have most in common.

Her brother would feel better if only he could be a little more far-sighted. After all, Renly only needs to share Margaery’s bed until he fills her belly with a child. After that, she’ll stay far clear (until, of course, it’s time to conceive another), and he can be all Loras’s. She’s no glutton for punishment. She has no desire to spend her every night trying to seduce a man who squeezes his eyes shut with dread at what he finds—or rather, doesn’t find—between her legs. Margaery has her pride, after all, and once she gets with child she’ll gladly stick to sharing her bed only with people she actually _does_ want to fuck.

She’s always known she wouldn’t be long for Highgarden, at any rate. She has never planned to stay in the South, getting married off to some little lordling and growing fat with his babies. No, there would be no such ordinary fate for the Rose of Highgarden—her family always made it lovingly clear that they intended her for greater things, so she grew to desire those unarticulated things for herself. She was actually a bit shocked by her own surprise at the idea of Renly Baratheon, for she’d begun some time ago to imagine that nothing could surprise her anymore. It isn’t so long past, after all, that her father had begun murmuring about Robert Baratheon, that old fat king who is dead now but at the time had been very lustily alive. Renly had been the one passing her portrait under the king’s nose then, teasing the suggestion of _her_ , Margaery, complimenting her beauty and extolling her charms, “just in case.” _In case of what?_ she’d said to her grandmother, wrinkling her nose, all of thirteen. _He already has a wife, and she’s given him two sons._ But her grandmother had only patted her hand, and smiled a thorny smile. 

So now she is wed to Renly, whom everyone says looks like a more glorious version of King Robert when he was young. Funny how things go, when you think about it. 

Unlike her brother, though, she can think matters through. Ever since whispers of golden-haired incest started to spread through camp, coiling like smoke under tent-flaps and into every conversation, insinuating that perhaps Robert Baratheon’s heirs are not so Baratheon after all, she’s been thinking that maybe she and her king really could have a chance. 

But then she remembers Stannis Baratheon. Don’t these men around her see that the end they desire will require kinslaying, the greatest sin of all? Her husband believes that he can convince his brother to forfeit his right to the throne; he thinks this is possible. And though she wishes irrationally that it could be so, it’s ridiculous to expect such a critical surrender of the man they call the lobster king. Or of any man in line to the throne, really. She knows that if she were Stannis Baratheon, she would laugh in the face of anyone who tried to convince her to give up her birthright.

And she knows also that this is a dangerous game they’re playing. But she thinks, as her grandmother would, with a little smile, _But it is a game worth playing._ _And this is a game that I don’t plan on losing_. So even though the odds are stacked against her (she is only a woman, and her lord husband is only a pretender king), she feels this promise she’s made to herself is true, she will make it true, just as truly as she has determined to be genuinely satisfied with this life she has been given, and this ever-advancing family into which she has been born. _They will never make me lose my head._

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve always been interested in the moment when Margaery first was asked to “enter in” on the relationship between her brother and Renly. Partially inspired by the third panel of [this art](https://cabepfir.deviantart.com/art/Three-Tyrell-relationships-290769984) by **cabepfir**. 
> 
> Title from the song by Billy Idol (because it's such a perfect song for Margaery, let's be real).


End file.
